Education of a King

BELGIUM Education of a King

The Ford station wagon rolled slowly through the Brussels traffic, drew up in the Marolles quarter. Three men climbed out: a cleric, a middle-aged official and a young man in a brown raincoat. They looked at the miserable shelter of a rags-and-flowers merchant, walked on through one of the more squalid slums of Europe. In one street they met a group of children. "It's the King!" cried a child. "How do you know it's the King?" "It must be. He has such nice shoes." The children shyly touched the young man's raincoat. Older people stared as at a mirage. For this indeed was young (22) King Baudouin of Belgium, out among the poorest of his subjects, without guard or escort, in the company of Public Health Minister Alfred de Taeye and Abbe Eduard Froidure. It had all begun with the abbe's eloquent pamphlet on Brussels' slums, unnoticed by cabinet ministers but read by a shocked Baudouin, who determined to see for himself. A veteran slum worker, the abbe led Baudouin from one foul tenement to another.

Hearing a tuberculous man complain that he had to pay 40 francs (80-c-) a day on medicine, the King pocketed the empty medicine bottle, apparently intending to insure the man a supply. In a 14-family one-toilet tenement, the King stooped under a clothesline to talk to the inhabitants.

One woman thought her visitors were public-health inspectors, pointed to a malodorous closet, exclaimed, "The proprietor's got a bathroom all in marble." In the growing darkness, Baudouin lit his way with a flashlight. Boys ran ahead of him calling, "The King is coming." In one crumbling house, when the King wanted to go upstairs, the residents were aghast.

"Don't," one said, "it's too disgusting." Baudouin did not insist.

In every home the King left a small sum of money. One old seamstress refused to accept her envelope, saying, "There are people worse off than I, monsieur." When the abbe told her the identity of her benefactor, she accepted. One man refused, saying, "I work for my living." It was night when Abbe Froidure drove the King back to Laeken Palace. Said Baudouin: "It's scandalous that people are living in such conditions." To Health Minister de Taeye he said: "Something must be done about it." Asked next day exactly what he was going to do about it, De Taeye said brightly: "The government is preparing plans. When will they be ready? It would be indiscreet to say."

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